Late-Breaking Polls Show Big Bounce For Joe Biden

Late-breaking polls of Super Tuesday states show former Vice President Joe Biden making big gains following his decisive victory in South Carolina and a flood of endorsements from former rivals eager to stop Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

The final FiveThirtyEight forecast finds Sanders and Biden each likely to win seven states a piece today, although the big question is whether Sanders can run up the score in California. The FiveThirtyEight model now counts Biden as the favorite to win the most delegates in Texas.

In California, the biggest delegate prize, a new Data for Progress poll found Sanders at 32 percent and Biden at 27 percent, while polls from Swayable and AtlasIntel found Sanders with an 8-point lead.

By the time we froze the FiveThirtyEight forecast at 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday morning, the Super Tuesday picture was a lot clearer — and overall, things look good for Biden.

Biden is now about twice as likely as Sanders to win a delegate plurality, according to our primary model, which gives him a 65 percent chance of doing so compared with a 34 percent chance for Sanders.

This represents the culmination of a trend that has been underway in the model for about a week; it started to shift toward Biden once polls showed the potential for him to win big in South Carolina — and it anticipated a polling bounce in the Super Tuesday states if he did win big there.